Blogs and Ends: The Opposite of Love
FIRST
Why don’t I have an opinion on the death of Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor Who?
I just don’t care.
That’s it. That’s the deal. I don’t care. I don’t give a shit.
Tolkien, I care about. I just wrote a multi-week 20,000+ word rant dedicated to my hatred of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
But the end of the worst era in the 60-year history of Doctor Who happened last night and YouTube had to tell me about it. I had promised myself I would watch the regeneration of the Karen-Doctor just to see her die, but in the end, I couldn’t be bothered.
The opposite of love is not hatred…but apathy.
NEXT
Writer’s Problem: The Hard Science Werewolf
Writers like to play with ideas so when presented with supernatural monsters like Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves one of our first instincts is to try to take the supernatural out of them.
You can do that with Zombies. Vampires are a little tricky but you can do it for them too.
Yeah, there is a lot of hand-waivem involved but you can do it.
But hard science werewolves are a problem.
Start with the biggest problem, which is mass. That can not change at all if you are talking hard science. So, you are stuck with something permanently with the same mass as a man.
Yes, you can bypass the whole issue and go the avatar route. A special biological shell is created and genetically keyed to a naturalist who just wants to study wolves up close. Until he finds that he loves, absolutely loves hunting the most dangerous game of all. Setting: Thirty years into the future.
But that is kind of a cheat.
You might be able to do something about the body hair. The teeth will be a major issue as well as the claws. And at the end of the day, you are stuck with something that looks like a 1940s werewolf.
NEXT
Just for masochistic kicks, I listened to Amazon’s official Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power podcast. I found it astonishing that as low an opinion as I have of McKay and Payne, I was capable of looking down on them even more.
I was positive that they didn’t have a story and they admitted they didn’t. They have no idea at all why they had Galadriel jump in the ocean. The plan from the start was to make something up later.
The reason they train-wrecked the canon was because they wanted “things to be a surprise.” While at the same time claiming they didn’t want to build a story around a big reveal. Translation, no one was surprised that Halbrand was Sauron, so their big reveal flopped, now they are claiming they never wanted a big reveal in the first place, so there.
They did make the hilarious mistake of comparing Rangz to Titanic.
Oh, and they honestly didn’t seem to have a clue about how evil Galadriel and the Filthy Gully Dwarves were.
The big reason they came up with the Elf Life Force plague was, (I’m not kidding here), they felt Tolkien got it wrong and they needed to fix the fucking story.
I understand the objections to the changes Jackson made in the movies, and these objections have merit. However, he made it clear that the only reason he was making those changes was because of the time constraints of a motion picture. No theater is going to agree to carry a five-hour movie because they can only show it three times a day. They wouldn’t make any money that way.
But Jackson didn’t do it because he thought Tolkien got it wrong.
Then there was the most revealing line in the podcast, “once Galadriel knew she was up against Sauron, she knew she had to stay and fight. So she had to lie to her friends to accomplish that. Two steps forward, one step back.”
I said it repeatedly when I was dragging this show, “they need a morality coach!”
NEXT
Batwoman Is Back
Darklings: What…? No-no. NO! How?
Dark Herald: Good question.
But in the CW Flash’s last season Javicia Leslie will be returning to the role that made her great…kind of.
I’m trying to come up with something to say about this but I can’t come up with anything that makes this any funnier.
Leslie will be returning not as Batwoman but as a gender-swapped villain incarnation of Batman.
I admit the show was so bad it was actually kind of hilarious if you got together with friends to hate-watch it. And now it’s going to be doing the same for The Flash.
LAST
I did look at the regeneration scene for the Karen-Doctor. The one where she turns back into David Tennent. And I will grant that it did give me a laugh. For the first time in the show’s sixty-year history, the Doctor’s clothes regenerated too. Every Doctor from Patrick Troughton to Jodie Whitaker’s first scene as the new doctor would be in the previous Doctor’s costume. Selecting the new costume was part of the new Doctor settling into his new iteration. But apparently, David Tennent looked at the Karen-Doctor’s clown suit and said, ‘fuck that! I’m not wearing that.’ Given the size of the barrel Tennent has them over, the BBC immediately relented.
Tennent is undoubtedly just a bait-and-switch anyway. The hope from the perpetually optimistic is that he will stick around. I, on the other hand strongly suspect he will be moving on to be a young gay black man within about 1-3 episodes.
Okay, I’m done here.
